Borrower
by sissyHIYAH
Summary: Borrowing comes as naturally to a thief as...hm. Well, not so naturally at all, really.


It wasn't the first time the girl had Borrowed, but it was the first time she had wondered about the word. It seemed silly, really, to just drift along and be a watcher, an observer to something truly wonderful. Life was meant to be lived, so it was said, so why live as a spectator in a game so grand?

Grand was a word that would earn her a smack, she was certain of it, but nothing else fit. It would be like trying to wear your boots as your hat, and then you'd have to be very clever indeed, figuring out how to wear two boots on one head. Maybe on the ears? One could never simply wear one boot on top of one's head. That would upset some cosmic balance somewhere and the world would spin in the other direction, and that would involve a lot of splashing. She knew that you couldn't just redirect the flow of water, at least not in mop buckets and bowls of soup. Liquid had a way of getting comfortable with itself and its direction in life and any attempts to change that meant you had to have a big towel handy. The seas were the same, she had no doubt. So objects meant for two appendages had to continue to exist as a pair, which meant that trying to describe Borrowing as anything other than grand was impossible.

But it _was_ grand, it really was, flying with the tiny sparrows that nested in the thatch above her bedroom or swimming with the speckled trout that jumped so much from the icy mountain streams that they may as well have been birds themselves. They would understand her, at least. They knew what it was like to be more than what they were, to seek something bigger and better and _grand._

The old woman wouldn't understand. "Walk before you run, else you fall and bump that empty head of yours." That's what she would say. She had experience, oh yes, many decades of experience Borrowing, but she didn't understand. It wasn't that the girl didn't appreciate experience. After all, the old woman was her teacher and she had learned many things from her, but there were things to learn and things that were in the bone that just had to be remembered.

This was one of those things and this was different.

She had Borrowed from Princess one night, her yellow kitten with the fading blue eyes that would one day be more yellow than the moon, and together they had crept along the walls of the old barn, down the path to the well, where the grass was trampled and flat. They had caught a moth that night, and she sometimes still felt the powdery scales drying her tongue whenever she tried to read or sleep. It was never when she was awake, milking the goats or gathering herbs or carrying water. Only when her mind slipped, when she wasn't quite in control.

But it wasn't until tonight, with morning-gray Queen, that she understood what she had always suspected. Borrowing was for those without conviction. She had always liked that word. Conviction. Those with conviction knew what they were about. It didn't matter if they were right or wrong. That was just a matter of perspective. What mattered was that they felt something to be true, and she wasn't sure that she felt anything to be true.

Except what she was feeling now, with the mouse between her claws and its little heart beating a little less every time she tossed it in the air. It was cruel and she knew it, but it was something purer than anything she had ever felt before, something she knew would hurt her if she ever stopped. But why should she ever stop? It was honest and it was real. Even when the mouse finally died and a tiny drop of blood blocked one of its nostrils, it was still _more _than any breath she would ever take.

"Lose yourself in that one day, you will."

And what would that mean, to be lost? Would that be so bad? To hunt and to swim and to fly? To know what sunlight means to shadow when night falls?

"Might not ever make it back. Not that it will matter to me, one way or another. You eat too much as it is."

Make it back? Make it back to what? To a dead mother and a father more interested in masonry than any of his daughters? To an old woman that thinks she's so smart? To a town full of idiots afraid to do anything other than what they've always done?

The girl licked her paws and considered the dead mouse. Now that it was dead, its back broken and its mouth open in an almost mocking sneer, something seemed off. The body was cooling, much more rapidly than it should, in spite of its size, and she no longer had an appetite. When the heart was still beating it had been great fun to flip it and chase it and taste its terror the way she sometimes listened to music. Her senses were still cracking through their shells, taste as sound, scent as touch, all swirling in her head and heart and body as mercury on glass, but the thrill of being more than herself never lessened or changed.

And that was the difference. Fire could never understand lightning, no matter how fiercely it burned. It had to rely on wood or paper, and though it could burn for hours, it would eventually die. What was left? Ashes and cinders, smoke, maybe. Lightning was a ghost after it passed, but while it lived it was everything. The world stopped to breathe the flash in the sky, and nothing else mattered.

So the old woman could keep her town and her people and her cowardly Borrowing. The girl had bigger plans.

Grand plans, even.

And she wouldn't even need to take off her boots.


End file.
